Ok, so how do we want to judge the awards? The options we have are as follows:

Firstly,
1A. Everyone can nominate and vote.
1B. Only webcartoonists can nominate and vote.

Secondly,
2A. Those eligable to nominate and vote are the ones who choose both shortlist and eventual winner
2B. Those eligable to nominate and vote narrow down a shortlist and then the judges vote for the winner.

Thirdly, if there are judges,
3A. Are their webcomics excluded from the category/ies they're judging?
3B. Are there different judges for each category, to reduce workload, or one set of judges, to reduce the total number of judges.
3C. Are they all from within TWCL community?
3D. Do we branch out and ask other prominent names in the webcomic industry?
3E. Do we branch out further and ask big names that aren't so connected to the webcomics comminuty (but perhaps connected with comics in general or other creative pursuits)?

Does anything else need to be considered? And what does everyone think?

We can maybe have a poll or three about this once things have been discussed a bit, if there's not an obvious consensus in this thread._________________"S*P*Q*R"

Judges and major organisers' comics should be completely excluded in my mind. Having their comics eligible leaves things open for allegations of rigging and puts the legitimacy of the awards in question.

I agree.

wendyw wrote:

Different judges would be nice to reduce workload and maybe allow for people to judge things that are more personally relevant to them, allow humour writers to judge humour comics and so on, but we'd have to see how many people we could get on board to see if that would be possible.

Hmm, good point. Perhaps, depending on how many judges we can get, we could have a core of say 4 judges judging all categories, plus three judges in each category who are only judging one or two categories each. So someone who's involved in humour comics would judge the humour category but not the longform category. Does that sound sensible? (Of course, it also assumes we can get a minimum number of judges).

wendyw wrote:

I'd also say that we should definitely look outside of this forum for at least some of the judges.

I think we should have a mix; while we don't want it to be too insular, it's still TWCL awards, so at least one or two forum members should be judges, especially since Casual and Kallisti have volunteered (and both have them have know-how and experience, so I see no reason they shouldn't be judges). Then we ask a few prominent names - the Halfpixel guys, perhaps, or Scott McCloud, or creators of huge big popular and well known webcomics, or even get a bit more ambitious and ask someone like Neil Gaiman on the off-chance (though maybe being that ambitious should wait til next year, when we'll have some kinks ironed out and some sort of precedence).

Though really we should discuss who we want to ask when we have other things sorted, like how many judges there will be, when it'll be, and how much we expect the judges to actually do._________________"S*P*Q*R"

Since my comic would only qualify to the "most environmentally friendly" category (comics that spend little to no energy because people don't read them) but I have not seen the category up yet, I guess I stand no chance._________________www.Midtoon.com